Alphanumeric case in-sensitive sorting in postgres

Question

I am new to postrges and want to sort varchar type columns. want to explain the problem with with below example:

table name: testsorting

   order             


        

Answer 1

Answer strongly inspired from this one.
By using a function it will be easier to keep it clean if you need it over different queries.

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION alphanum(str anyelement)
   RETURNS anyelement AS $$
BEGIN
   RETURN (SUBSTRING(str, '^[^0-9]*'),
      COALESCE(SUBSTRING(str, '[0-9]+')::INT, -1) + 2000000);
END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql IMMUTABLE;

Then you could use it this way:

SELECT name FROM testsorting ORDER BY alphanum(name);

Test:

WITH x(name) AS (VALUES ('b'), ('B'), ('a'), ('a1'),
   ('a11'), ('a2'), ('a20'), ('A'), ('a19'))
SELECT name, alphanum(name) FROM x ORDER BY alphanum(name);

 name |  alphanum   
------+-------------
 a    | (a,1999999)
 A    | (A,1999999)
 a1   | (a,2000001)
 a2   | (a,2000002)
 a11  | (a,2000011)
 a19  | (a,2000019)
 a20  | (a,2000020)
 b    | (b,1999999)
 B    | (B,1999999)